Presentation on what's next in journalism at US j-schools March 2014

1. Journalism:
what next?
George Brock
Professor and Head of Journalism
City University London
March 2014

2. What links these men?

3. …with these?

4. Or with this…

5. New bits of journalism landscape
• Jeff Bezos (Amazon + Washington
Post)
• Pierre Omidyar’s: Ebay + First Look
news sites
• Vox
• Vice
• Buzzfeed

6. Common denominators
• New players without legacy
• Serious money
• Innovation via experiment
• = re-invention
• Not easy to embarrass

7. How this book came about

8. When you hear people moaning
about the future of
journalism, remember…
• Journalism’s history was mostly like this:
messy, experimental, improvisational and –
quite often – not at all serious.
• People working in mainstream, established
newsrooms often don’t see what’s going on at
the grassroots.

9. Late 20th century was unusual
• Plenty of advertising in print
• So much in 1990s they thought they needn’t
worry about the internet any time soon
• Plenty of advertising in network (terrestrial)
TV
• This produced a stability which persuaded
journalists that they had always worked in a
well-resourced environment

10. UK national daily and Sunday
newspaper circulation 1950-2000

11. • Words + pix
• Reading/watching habits will change because
people are on the move
• Open sourcing
• User/reader’s frame of reference is wider
because of instant comparison
• Data comes alive
News media re-invent where
digital creates news possibilities

12. There’s a pattern here
• Disruption
• …is followed by regeneration
• But not always immediately
• And in the gap between newsrooms close and
jobs are lost
• People always notice the loss before the
regeneration

13. Stop worrying and enjoy digital
• Be clear about what journalism is for
• 4 tasks which still require skill and practice:
– Verification
– Sense-making
– Eye-witness
– Investigation

14. What could still go wrong
• Words are needed for ideas at length
• Local/hyperlocal: very hard
• TV hasn’t yet hit its digital crunch
• Metadata: already very dangerous
(particularly to journalists)

15. Remember what “experiment” means
• Most fail
• What happens is not what is predicted
• Even if it is predicted, it won’t happen on
schedule
• Established companies and organisations are at a
disadvantage
• Experiments produce winners and winners get
bigger
• Look at history: this is what happened in the past

16. What will distinguish winners?
• They have ideas about what journalism is for
• Lean and mean
• They scale carefully
• Pragmatic, flexible and confident with back-end
tech
• Combine aggregation and origination
• They organise for high-quality experiment
• That usually means very good tech back end +
data

17. •THESE are the
companies to work for

18. • @georgeprof
• www.georgebrock.net
• www.city.ac.uk/journalism